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War by Any Other Name

We are at war! Well, that’s not precisely true. We are at wars—wars all over the world. We are also being attacked all over the world and at home. The problem is that we don’t really seem to notice.

If you wonder why we don’t seem to notice, one answer is that we have virtually banished war. More effectively than the Kellog-Briand Pact that outlawed war, we just don’t use the word in its Constitutional meaning. We have not declared war since 1941. Yet we sent troops and fought wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. We sent soldiers into Syria, Grenada, Laos and Columbia. We have advisors—well armed—all over the world. We have American “boots on the ground” all over Latin America and Africa. We have 800 soldiers in Niger and 6,000 spread across Sub-Saharan Africa from Djibouti (400), to Cameroon (100+). We are also in Mali.

Are these deployments a good idea or bad? Do we have a reasonable chance of success? Do we have a definition of success? I don’t know, but shouldn’t we be discussing this?

We fight. We kill. We die. We do this while in uniform and from planes and by drones marked with our identifications; so these are not really secret wars. They are only under-reported and badly understood.

Since we don’t declare war anymore, these are “police actions,” “advisory deployments,” and, my favorite current term of art, “kinetic actions.” These non-wars are only a small part of the violence we deal in.

We also have “contractors,” who once were called soldiers of fortune. They are not uniformed members of our armed forces, but they do kill and die for our government—but with less legal accountability and far fewer benefits if they themselves are hurt or killed. At the moment, we have more contractors in Afghanistan than official troops.

So we get rid of wars that have to be declared by our sleeping Congress. War today is only used to modify other issues. We have a War on Drugs. We had a War on Poverty. And, of course, there’s the War on Christmas.

The great question is not IF we will go to war with Iran, Russia, North Korea, or China? We are at war. When we, along with Israel, launched Stuxnet against Iran, this malware was not for espionage but sabotage. It harmed Iranian nuclear technology. I was fine with this, but it was an attack and we, in the public, didn’t understand it as an act of war on our part.

Iran is currently fighting a bunch of wars—semi-proxy wars—against Saudi Arabia, the whole Sunni Arab World and, of course, Israel. Their major battlegrounds are Yemen, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon.

North Korea attacked the United States using cyber warfare. This was not merely stealing embarrassing information from a movie studio but probing into our infrastructure. Some of the electric blackouts we’ve experienced might not have been just from our old power grid, but from actions by North Korea.

China also is believed to have probed our electronic infrastructure and taken down whole areas of the nation briefly, as a test—and possibly a threat. They may have left their blurred electronic fingerprints to warn and intimidate us.

Only this week, when Russia tried to assassinate a former Russian spy in England, the world began to react. Killing on foreign territory, whether your own citizens or foreign nationals, is an act of war. Thus, the question is not about if there will be wars but what constitutes the meaning of the word War? What level of violence and damage move the category from one cat to another? Russia’s use of nerve agents last week, along with another Russian citizen killed with Polonium a few years ago, is not only war but deeply transgressive. This is breaking a taboo as well as a law against chemical and biological weapons. This is a big deal!

Then again, this week we admitted that Russia had infiltrated our power grid, including some nuclear reactors. They may well have a kill switch that can take our electric system down, or worse, as with Stuxnet, they might be able to overheat our reactors and cause massive damage—even explosions.

We have reason to believe that Trojan Horses are planted throughout our infrastructure, secreted by a whole host of unfriendly nations. Think about bringing down the grid. No ATMs. No credit card purchases. Little ability even to open cash registers for cash transactions. How about wiping out our bank accounts and stock portfolios? How would we prove our electronic assets? Offer paper copies of statements (most of which are being switched to digital)? And if you’re in the air, what happens to air traffic control if the whole system goes down?